Overview and Best Practices

Includes instructions on how to scan your personal collections, and information about how long digital storage media last. Specific tips are provided for photographs, audio, video, email, personal digital records and websites.

This practical overview from the Paradigm project (University of Manchester and JISC) includes practical tips, including intellectual property rights and privacy concerns and the benefits of using open source software.

5) "Digital Preservation in a Box" -- a product of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance, this site is designed as a toolkit to support outreach activities that introduce the basic concepts of preserving digital information -- tools included!

File Formats

The Library of Congress describes the attributes they consider important when selecting file formats for archiving the LC collections.
These include disclosure, adoption, transparency, self-documentation, external dependencies, impact of patents, and technical protection mechanisms.
They provide a list of different formats, continually updated, and rate them according to these considerations. Look yours up here to see how well LC thinks it rates
in terms of these attributes:
"Format Descriptions".

The U. S. National Archives offers advice when selecting a file format for long-term storage. For example:

"When selecting a format consider the following aspects:
* The format should be publicly and openly documented.
* The format is non-proprietary.
* The format is in widespread use.
* The format is self-documenting.
* The format can be opened, read, and accessed using readily-available tools."

International Imaging Industry Association recommendations for digital photos: "Are your memories safe?" This site provides a comprehensive overview of what needs to be considered, and also drills down to specifics, such as how to label, how to back up, what to do in case of hard drive failure, virus attack or camera card failure.

Do you use blogs, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or other social media? Do you have your own website? Here's your options for managing and/or archiving your content there so you can back it up properly.

"Preserving Personal Web Content" Abigail Grotke, web archiving team lead and Gina Jones, digital media project coordinator, both from the Office of Strategic Initiatives’ Web Archiving team at the Library of Congress, offer practical advice on preserving web content from the May 10, 2010 Library of Congress Personal Archiving Day.